The Album Arena: Bastille’s “Bad Blood” is a bore

Spencer McCoy
Staff Writer
smccoy@lhup.edu

February 20, 2014

Bastille dropped a bloody bomb on us last year March, 1. The album starts off with the incredibly popular single Pompeii. This was possibly the best way to start off the album. Pompeii spent 155 days on the top 100 charts. The album starts off with a fast paced beat while Dan Smith (Lead singer for Bastille) continues to sing to great measure throughout the entire album. As the album continues on, each song follows the other respectfully and were clearly placed in their order perfectly.

However after a few of the songs, I felt like I was listening to much of the same thing with some slight variation. The lyrics were generally about the same topic. I think throughout the album Bastille is continuously trying to tell us about a relationship that just ended up going sour. A great topic to sing about but to have your album completely based around it can get hectic. Many of the songs on the album have repetitive lyrics that I think could have been explained differently.

All of the instruments on the album sound great. The piano has a great peaceful sound to it while the drum and bass are continuously hammering a serious emotion into each note. Each song has a specific tone they were going for that I think they achieved well. There were sad songs, and happy songs. Some songs that had mixed emotions, and some that hold onto a hope for things to get better. One of the best songs on the album was “Oblivion”. However I think the reason I like this song was because it didn’t really sound like the rest of the album. It showed some interesting creativity and wasn’t as repetitive. This was the most emotionally intense song on the album. I think Dan truly shows that he can produce a great song without the overly done electronic beats that the rest of the album contains.

The album was pretty good throughout its entirety, however I think if Bastille wants to release another album they need to think more creatively and try to move away from the relationship sob story they went for.